Two artists, photographer Regina DeLuise and painter Gwen Hardie bring an unusually heightened attention to how light and shadow reveal the body within the physical world. The tenderness of the human experience has been an enduring and central subject in the photographs of Regina DeLuise. She works with film and a large format 8 x10 camera, which requires a collaborative and sympathetic engagement between herself and her subject. Her photographs reveal the essence of these encounters: an extended choreography of sensate observation.
Gwen Hardie paints magnifications of small portions of skin on the tondo format. She expands the idea of oil paint as skin, with no context or narrative, emphasizing the actual surface quality of the paint. Hardie favors the direct, unmediated, perception of her eye; how light effects on the skin can create ambiguous depths of field. She takes this encounter and transforms it into a spatially ambiguous terrain, where it is possible to move perceptually between the image of skin and an unquantifiable larger world.
This exhibition invites a comparison of how the human eye and the camera lens record and process similar information differently. Hardie and DeLuise share an exacting passion for how life appears in the phenomenal world yet with equal insistence on how the physical world can reveal the interior experience.